Charlotte Street (21 page)

She finished her last bite of pie and I tried not to look disappointed.

‘I just think you’re bruised.’

‘I’m not bruised,’ I said, a little too quickly and before I’d really had time to consider what she’d meant.

‘Of course you’re bruised. The other night I asked you to tell me something about yourself and what was the first thing you told me?’

‘The camera thing?’ I tried.

She smiled, and sat back in her seat. A gap opened up – an awkward, yawning pause she didn’t seem in a rush to fill.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m a bit bruised.’

‘Most guys would’ve tried to impress me,’ she said. ‘If I’d said, “Tell me something about yourself”, they’d’ve said, “I
once saved a life”, or “I love animals”, or “My greatest fault is sometimes I’m just too kind”. But you decided to show me how bruised you are.’

‘What favour do you need?’ I said, trying to move things on.

‘Jason …’

‘Come on, anything. What favour do you need?’

‘I want to have a child.’

She sat back in her chair and stared at me, hard. The music seemed to get louder, the place more confusing.

‘I … what?’

‘I know it’s weird, but listen: do you want children?’

Oh, terrific. A nutjob. She was a nutjob.

‘Well, I, eventually,’ I stumbled, nodding, trying to pretend that almost everyone else in this pub was probably having a very similar conversation. ‘You know, but … not tonight.’

‘It wouldn’t be tonight,’ she said. ‘It takes nine months. Bloody NHS. So when do you want children? Narrow it down for a girl.’

‘Well … I want them. I want them eventually. I … I’ve thought about it sometimes, I won’t lie, but—’

I shrugged and waved my hands a bit. It was the absolute best I could do.

‘And that’s your final answer, is it?’

I just need to finish this drink and I could be home in twenty minutes.

‘I think so, yes.’

She thought about it. A frosty moment. And then a snigger.

‘Jason, I don’t really want to have a child, I’m about three hundred years younger than you with my whole life ahead of me.’

And the relief and the joy on my face must have been obvious, because she laughed and said, ‘I’m messing with you! You looked
terrified
! I do not want your child!’

And while I struggled to find a response without the word ‘hallelujah’ in it, she took a sip of her pint and said, ‘I just want you to talk to me.’

I took a moment, studied her face.

Why would someone who was not interested be so interested? I thought, despite myself.

And then:

‘Jason,’ said a voice, a stern one, breaking the silence.

I’m not keen on stern voices, piercing silences. They don’t generally bring great news. I looked up.

Anna.

Anna? What was Anna …? Words whizzed through my head.

‘I just think you need to take a long, hard look at yourself and maybe reign in the drinking because it’s not healthy, all this drinking, Jason.’

My grip on the pint glass tightened.

‘A pint does not solve anything, and you also need to let Sarah and Gareth live their lives because you had your chance and you need to be a grown-up about it.’

‘Hello,
Anna
,’ I said, and if I’d been in a cartoon, it would’ve been through gritted teeth. Anna had a way of talking to me that made me feel like I’d somehow been caught doing something I shouldn’t, and here it was happening again: a quick flush of embarrassment rushed through me. Anna was Sarah’s best friend. At least until I’d been on the scene. She hadn’t taken to me particularly well, nowhere near as well as she’d apparently taken to Gary, I’d been told. Gary and his stupid man’d face.

Now Sarah was rid of me, Anna had been doing her level-best to get back in with Sarah. Sarah and Gary. And I’d always suspected that was through badmouthing me. Never again
would she let Sarah go. Anna thrived on information. By which I mean gossip. You give Anna some gossip, Anna will use it well and make it last.

I suppose if I was still a teacher, I’d mark her like this:

‘How
are
you?’ I said, faux-beaming, knowing I just had to brave this out, give nothing away, and she’d be gone soon.

Anna made a
tsk
sound and extended her arm to Abbey, using it as an excuse to take her in, study her, steal a glance at her ripped Bowie T-shirt and electric blue eyeliner and all the other things that really didn’t seem very me at all.

‘Sorry, he’s so
rude
, isn’t he?’ She laughed, lightly, but what she really meant by that was that I’m rude. ‘I’m Anna. I’m a friend of Sarah’s?’

She put a question mark on the end of that. She didn’t need to. It was a fact, not a question. She was fishing; trying to get Abbey’s reaction; trying to work out who she was by what she knew. Did she know about Sarah? wondered Anna. Had I told her the full story?

‘
Svetlana
,’ said a voice immediately to my left, in a deep and heavy Russian accent. Which was odd, because Abbey was immediately to my left, and her accent was not deep, or heavy,
and it was British, and what’s more, I was pretty sure there was no one called Svetlana here.

‘Oh!’ said Anna, seemingly impressed.

‘I am Russian prostitute.’

I turned and stared, shocked.

‘Jason visit me often, but sometime he just want to meet up and cry.’

Anna’s eyes widened slightly.

‘Today is just lot of crying. Crying and pie. I call these night a Jason Priestley night. Just crying and pie. CryPie.’

Anna took a moment, nodded, grinned at her shoes, looked up and looked annoyed.

‘Seems you’ve met someone your own age, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Enjoy your pie.’

I watched her leave, wondering if she’d perhaps forget this, and Sarah might never hear about it.

‘And crying too!’ shouted Abbey, after her. ‘Pie
and
cry!’

I turned back to her, speechless.

‘I thought that was your ex,’ she said, stifling a giggle.

‘So you thought you’d say you were a prostitute I visit so I can cry a lot?’

‘Yeah, man!’ she said. ‘Girls love that shit!’

‘Do they?’

‘Not many of them. She didn’t look your type anyway. She’d been shopping at Crabtree & Evelyn. The minute you start buying anything that smells of lavender you might as well book your Saga trip, too.’

I smiled, shook my head.

‘Hey, let’s go out!’ she said.

I was confused.

‘We
are
out.’

‘Then let’s go
further
out.’

I didn’t know if I was ‘with’ Abbey or not tonight, but I guessed I probably wasn’t, because at one point she greeted another man by kissing him full on the lips.

We were at The Good Mixer, in Camden, surrounded by snake-hipped hipsters. Already, we’d visited an Indian takeaway on Castlehaven Road because they gave away free Bombay Mix, plus we’d popped in to the Hawley Arms, where we’d seen Nick Grimshaw hunched in a corner animatedly squabbling with a tall man in a silly hat.

There is something that sounds young, and exciting, and cool, about heading to Camden on a whim. In reality, it makes me very uncomfortable. Safeguards are needed. A sturdy pair of shoes, to navigate through the cricks and cracks of discarded chicken bones underfoot. A look of polite but steely determination to get past the men offering you drugs every six or seven feet, like helpers at a marathon offering cups of water.

‘Hashish, mate?’ says the first man.

‘Hashish?’ says the second.

‘Hash?’ says the third, just in case in the last twelve feet you’ve reconsidered, radically rethought your life and suddenly developed quite a craving.

‘Why?’ you want to shout. ‘What makes yours better than his? At least put some effort in! You will never make it onto
Dragon’s Den
with a pitch like that!’

I was tired already, and it was only 11.45.

I knew it was ‘only’ 11.45, because Abbey kept using the word ‘only’ whenever whatever time it was was mentioned. It could ‘only’ be Judgement Day and Abbey would find one last bar for us to go to before we hit the Pearly Gates Arms.

This, of course, was why I liked her. She reminded me of the way things had been. Before Sarah, even. Time was, I could do all-nighters like Abbey. I kept it going, too, for longer into
my twenties than might necessarily have been healthy. It was a way of being footloose, of being fancy-free, in a way the city’s so practised at encouraging.

So anyway, the guy that Abbey kissed –
briefly
, I kept telling myself; it was very
brief –
turned out to be in a band too, and that was when I realised that Abbey probably mainly hung out with boys in bands. I decided to be supercool. I started to use the word ‘man’ again.

‘Can I getcha a drink, man?’ I said. In my head, saying ‘getcha’ was cool, but I’d forgotten that the next word was ‘a’, so saying ‘getcha a’ was pretty cumbersome and made me sound like perhaps I had an impediment of some kind.

‘I’m cool,’ said the boy, and that was annoying, because he was right.

‘Back in a mo,’ said Abbey.

I looked around and once more felt very old indeed. There were skinny jeans and skinny ties and tight-fitting tees and military boots and porkpie hats and lots of swaying and stumbling and slurring around the dimly-lit pool table. With Abbey gone, I was hit by a wave of self-consciousness. I thought about what I was wearing. Jeans, so that was okay, but they weren’t jeans like these people were wearing. I wouldn’t know where to buy jeans like these people were wearing. I had a shirt I’d seen someone in
GQ
put on, and some Converse, but here I stuck out like a sore thumb. How old were these people? Twenty? Twenty-one? Any one of these people could have been my pupils. Any one of them might right now have been thinking: is that sir? Is that sir-in-his-thirties
sir?
Here in the
Good Mixer?
Walking
amongst
us?

‘What’s the name of your band?’ I asked the boy, and he barely looked at me, maybe in case he caught whatever it was I’d caught that made you old, and he mumbled, ‘Bearpit Liars.’

‘Good name,’ I said, and he just nodded, then wandered off.

And then:

‘Ta-dah!’

It was Abbey. She was back. But she wasn’t wearing her Bowie T-shirt anymore.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked, shocked.

‘Stole it,’ she said.

‘You stole that T-shirt? When?’

‘When I went to the toilet at the restaurant. I think it makes me look very professional.’

I read the T-shirt again.

A magical slice of pizza heaven! – Jason Priestley, London Now!

‘Well, it makes you look professional in the sense that it makes you look like you work at Abrizzi’s.’

‘Well, I have heard
excellent
things about their pizzas,’ she said. ‘Hey, where did Jay go?’

‘Jay? Jay who you … kissed?’

Ah, Jay. You win. Looks like I’ll be leaving soon.

‘Relax,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably kiss
you
at some point.’

Or maybe I’ll stay a little longer.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ she said.

I don’t know who goes for walks after midnight in Camden. Literally no one in the history of Camden or its neighbouring boroughs has thought going for a walk after midnight down by the lock is a good idea. Plus, I feel I have made my own thoughts on walking around Camden at night quite clear, but obviously I hadn’t made them clear enough to Abbey, because she seemed deadset on walking, not just through Camden, but right down by the houseboats, lit by candles and decorated by cans, under blinking, jittery, not-at-all-reliable streetlights.

But when a girl has said she might at some point kiss you, you sort of agree to a lot of things. Even if they
are
by a canal.

We walked a little further, past two dark shapes I was certain were muggers but turned out to be a nervous man and a little dog.

‘So what kind was it?’ asked Abbey. ‘The camera you found?’

I smiled. The camera again. Maybe she had a thing for cameras.

‘It was a disposable.’

‘Cooool,’ said Abbey. ‘So old-school. Something about them, though. It’s like instant nostalgia. Like, those photos
mean
something because they were thought about,
then
taken. Not like the billion you end up with after a night out on your phone or whatever. Those photos are just wallpaper. Disposable is permanent.’

‘You should meet my flatmate. You’d get on.’

‘And the girl? What’s happening with her?’

I frowned.

‘How did you know there was a girl?’

‘Well, when you said she was pregnant I kind of assumed.’

‘Oh.
That
girl. The
ex
girl.’

‘You’re getting over her.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because she wasn’t the first girl you thought of. She was the
second
girl you thought of. One day she’ll be the third and then you won’t even think of her at all.’

I kicked at some leaves.

‘Yeah, it’s just … you know. When we broke up, it—’

‘
How
did you break up?’

And as we sat down on a bench, I started to tell Abbey about it, and she stared out at the canal, and made the appropriate noises, and asked the right questions, and then I prepared myself to tell her the one thing that I’ve been avoiding telling you up until now.

Because we’ve been getting on, I feel, you and me. We had a rocky start where maybe I was a bit grumpy, but you know I had my reasons, and a lot of the time that was down to the
Jezynowka
, and now, just as we’re starting to properly click, I end up on a bench with an exciting girl and I get to the bit where I know you’re not going to like me any more.